I feel as if I’m in someone else’s body, as if this isn’t happening to me but to a different person.
It can’t be. I begin to shake. The beep in the room intensifies, the continuous sound hurting my ears and grating on my nerves.
Someone shot a rocket at the convoy in which my parents and their guards were traveling. Their route was top secret. My father had been paranoid about keeping his itineraries guarded. No one knew when he’d leave the house, and when he did, only his closest guards and the driver knew the roads he’d take.
But I did.
The men talked around me as if I didn’t exist.
The truth twists like a corkscrew into my stomach. Not even Leander knew the route my father planned on taking tonight. My mother had no idea either.
But I did.
I did because I heard them when I hovered outside his study, searching for the right moment to tell him I was pregnant.
And I told Dante. He asked me when my father would be out so we could have one whole night together.
So I told him everything.
He knew.
My mother was right.
Dante used me.
He told me himself he and my father were enemies, that my father could never know we were seeing each other in secret.
No.
I think I may break apart. My heart shatters into shards inside my chest. I clutch a hand over my stomach as if I can protect my baby from the vicious betrayal of his father.
Jazz, who knows my family as well as she knows her own, covers her mouth with both hands. Her chest moves rapidly, matching the rhythm of the pulse drumming in my ears. I told her about our plans, what Dante and I were going to do.
“Tiana.” Her tone is brittle. “Did you tell him?”
My selfishness is my worst punishment, tearing me apart. How I hate myself.
The only sound I’m capable of making is a raw, animalistic cry that twists my mouth. I can’t speak. I can’t say it, because doing so will mean I have to admit the truth.
It’s my fault that they died. They paid with their lives because I wanted to sleep in Dante’s arms.
My blind love and stupid naivety are the reasons my mother is dead.
Chapter
Four
Tatiana
* * *
For a week, I do nothing but grieve.
Even as my body heals, my soul dies a little more each day.
My mother paid my medical bill in advance. She was clever enough to have done so in cash. She never left anything to chance. She believed in always being prepared for any unforeseen event. For that reason, she’d stashed away a small sum of cash she’d pinched from the grocery allowance every week until, over the years, it had accumulated in a substantial amount of money, which she’d hidden behind a loose tile on the side of her tub.
Every so often, she’d take me into her bathroom and show me the plastic bags filled with banknotes so that I wouldn’t forget where to find them if anything happened to her. She’d said it was our secret, that Leander and my father weren’t to know about the money.
